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Mike Tony 
Former Columbia forward Alex Rosenberg has signed a two-year deal to play professionally for Maccabi Kiryat Gat of the Israeli Basketball Premier League, Columbia Athletics stated Wednesday.
Rosenberg graduated in May after finishing sixth in school history with 1,430 points and his 478 free throws ranked second in Lions history as well.
Adam Zagoria of SNY.tv reported Friday (and our own Richard Kent confirmed) that Yale junior guard Makai Mason will play with the German national team for the next two months and then in the World Games 2017, joining Columbia 2016 graduate (and fellow All-Ivy first-teamer) Maodo Lo.
Lo has played for the German national team for the past two years and remains an “intriguing prospect from an NBA standpoint” on the Philadelphia 76ers’ Summer League roster per The Sixer Sense.
Maodo Lo, Columbia’s all-time leader in three-pointers, and former Cornell standout Shonn Miller is headed for the NBA Summer League.
The 2016 Columbia graduate will join the Philadelphia 76ers’ Summer League teams in Utah and Las Vegas in July, as reported by ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla.
Miller, who used his final year of eligibility at UConn last season after four years in Ithaca, has agreed to a Summer League deal with the Utah Jazz, as reported by Bleacher Report’s David Pick.
The Utah Summer League takes place from July 4-7 in Salt Lake City, while the Las Vegas Summer League runs from July 8-18. Both events will air on NBA TV.
Ivy Hoops Online caught up with Onaje Woodbine (Yale ’02) for an in-depth conversation about his new book “Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball,” a book exploring the transcendent experience that the game has provided as lived religion for young black males playing basketball on the same playgrounds in the Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan sections of Boston where he’d played as a teenager.
In the book, Woodbine chronicles quitting the Yale basketball team in 2000 to pursue “the higher aims of divine purpose and truth” and a disconnect between himself and his players at coaches and Yale that took on cultural and racial overtones. Most centrally, he illustrates how playing basketball represented a religious experience for young black males in Boston dealing with grief and tragedy in their neighborhoods and families.
Just three days before leaving for South Africa, where a play based on the book will be performed, Woodbine talked to Ivy Hoops Online about what Yale basketball fans should take away from his book, why Yale coach James Jones (also Woodbine’s sophomore-year coach in 1999-2000) reached out to him recently, and the power of religious consciousness.
Former Yale men’s basketball captain Jack Montague filed a lawsuit against the university Thursday, arguing that the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct (UWC) unjustly made him a “poster boy” by expelling him in February for violating university policy on sexual misconduct.
Deputy Title IX Coordinator Angela Gleason and Senior Deputy Title IX Coordinator Jason Killheffer are also named as defendants in the lawsuit in addition to the university. The suit alleges that the university’s expulsion was a breach of Yale’s contractual obligations and a violation of his Title IX rights.
Jim McMillian, one of the most celebrated players in Columbia and Ivy League basketball history, died Monday at 68.
The Los Angeles Times reported McMillian died from heart failure complications at a hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C. after being in failing health in recent months.
McMillian led Columbia to a No. 6 national ranking and the program’s last Ivy championship to date in 1968 and a No. 14 national ranking in 1969. In 1970, McMillian made his third consecutive All-America team, his third consecutive All-Ivy team, and won his third consecutive Haggerty Award for the best New York City college basketball player.
Columbia went 63-14 during McMillian’s three years as a varsity Lion, and the program’s ’68 league title was due to his 37 points on 22 shots in the team’s 92-74 Ivy playoff win over Princeton.
Dartmouth Athletics announced Monday that David McLaughlin is Dartmouth men’s basketball’s next head coach.
McLaughlin comes to Dartmouth via Northeastern, where McLaughlin was associate head coach and recruiting coordinator for the past three seasons. Northeastern made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 24 years in 2014-15 with McLaughlin as associate head coach. The Huskies went 18-15 last season. According to Dartmouth Athletics, McLaughlin secured eight players for the classes of 2019 and 2020 from six different states, including Massachusetts, Florida and California.
Cornell Athletics announced Monday that it has hired Princeton assistant coach Brian Earl to be its next head coach, replacing Bill Courtney, who was fired last month, in the position.
Earl became associate head coach in 2015 and had been an assistant under two head coaches for the past nine seasons at Princeton, which he graduated from in 1999. According to Princeton Athletics, Earl’s Ivy League peers voted him as the league’s top assistant coach in a November 2010 FoxSports.com poll, and Earl served another five years as assistant under Mitch Henderson, who was promoted to head coach following Princeton’s 2010-11 Ivy League Championship under then-head coach Sydney Johnson.
Jim Engles was announced as Columbia’s new head coach Sunday by Columbia Athletics, succeeding Kyle Smith in the position. Engles previously served as an assistant coach from 2003-08 under then-head coach Joe Jones and compiled a 100-88 record in eight seasons as head coach at NJIT, which had only competed for two years in Division I prior to Engles’ taking over.
Engles led the Highlanders to the CIT semifinals each of the past two seasons, including an 80-65 loss to Columbia in the semifinals at Levien Gym in his final game as NJIT’s coach as the Lions went on to win the CIT championship.
Engles is a 1990 graduate of Dickinson College. As Columbia Athletics notes, his uncle John was a high school All-American who went on to play at Penn under Chuck Daly from 1973-76. Engles served as an assistant at Rider from 1997-2003 and at Wagner from 1990-97.
The panel looks back at Yale’s NCAA Tournament run, Columbia’s CIT championship and Princeton’s NIT matchup, analyzes the Ivy coaching carousel and looks ahead to the 2016-17 season. Peter Andrews and Mike Tony are joined by IHO founder Ian Halpern, IHO writer George Clark and Jonathan Tannenwald of Philly.com for this final episode of the 2015-16 season:
(Part 1)
(Part 2)